We recently bought a house with 5 beautiful, but badly neglected, Mexican Elder trees in the front yard. I gathered enough information from books and forums to do some basic commonsensical pruning on 4 of them, but am at a loss as to what to do with the last one. It is the main tree across from the front door and thus very important to the whole ensemble.
It is about 6 years old and (very approximately) 18 feet tall. It has two main trunks, about 6 inches in diameter, with a 30 degree angle between them. Approximately 7-8 feet from the ground a shoot came out on the inner side of each trunk and shot straight up. I am assuming it is one of those useless vertical shoots, which are also called suckers (?). It is smoother and lighter in color than the rest of branches, and does not branch out for the first 5 feet or so. From what I remember from my reading, "branches" like these will never amount to anything useful and normally I would just prune these two shots out. However, they must have appeared a few years ago. The each are now some 4-5 inches in diameter, a size comparable to the main trunks they came out of. They are the highest and better looking branches, and indeed the only branches filling to some degree all the central space in the tree. The main trunks they came out of ended up not developing any branches on the inside, very few solid branches on the outside, which do not spread more than a couple of feet from the tree. I am afraid that if I cut these two shoots down the tree will never be able to fill the space in the middle. Since the tree also requires some crown raising and removal of some low and just obviously useless branches, I am concerned that I will not be able to delete both, or even one, of the shoots this winter. But I am not sure if not removing them is any solution either. As I mentioned they branch out only on the very top of the tree, and so do not seem to add uch to the tree. It is normally said that the shoots are useless, and to remove them when they are young. But these are so old that I wonder if the rule still applies, or if at this point some good might actually come out of their branches.
I will appreciate any insight into this, and will be happy to post/send a photo if it helps.
Thanks!
Dibbit
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